Robotic Drive-Thru Swaps EV Batteries in 5 Minutes

[Applause] imagine you're driving your EV and you realize you're just about out of juice but you don't have 30 minutes or maybe even an hour to spend charging your battery now imagine you could come to a drive-through like this and swap in a brand new fully charged battery in about five minutes piece to your eyes on this next Generation battery swapping station from startup ample you

stations popping up around the San Francisco Bay area and Partnerships with Uber and last mile delivery startup Sally now the company is ready to swap out the old for the new at first glance some of the upgrades are pretty obvious the new stations are now large enough to fit large delivery trucks and it's a drive-through model as opposed to the previous stations that required a driver

to exit the same way they entered but maybe the most significant Improvement is speed it takes a first gen station about 10 minutes to complete a battery swap the new station cuts that time in half to just five minutes that's probably not much longer than it takes to fill your gas tank if you drive a non-electric vehicle there's no EV on the market that can get

to a full charge that quickly and you might be asking what kind of cars does ample's technology work with the answer is just about any EV the only company in the world that has a way to separate the car from the battery chemistry what that means is we make any car work with any battery chemistry which allows us to make the batteries function in a way

like gas when you look at gas no matter which car you come in you put the same gas into it without technology we're able to do that with batteries as well ample accomplished this by creating its own interface tray about the same size as a battery under the car where the battery would go inside those trays are battery modules containing non-proprietary battery cells during a swap

a driver rolls onto the platform which raises so the robot can easily reach the bottom of the vehicle the robot unlocks a tray that's locked under the car removes it and replaces it with a fresh tray the drain units can then be recharged at the station and swapped in for the next customer ample says they designed the new stations to be fast and easy to deploy

there's no construction involved you can place this on the ground and you can deploy a station in three days it comes in pre-built Parts you go through connect them test them and you're up and running ample just announced a partnership with Fisker maker of this EV right behind me to put its battery swapping Technologies on Fisker Vehicles meanwhile you can expect to see ample's new swapping

stations in the U.S later this year as well as Kyoto Japan and Madrid so what do you think of these swapping stations do you want to see one in your city let me know in the comments below if you enjoyed this video please don't forget to give it a thumbs up subscribe to CNET for more what the future